[WhitneyLand]

It’s not the greatest term even for graphics only.

People new to CG are likely to intuit “shaders” as something related to, well, shading, but vertex shaders et al have nothing to do with the color of a pixel or a polygon.

[paulmd]

Wait until they learn a kernel has nothing to do with operating systems! And tensor operations have nothing to do with tensor objects! And texture memory often isn't even used for textures!

It's an unfortunate set of terminology due to the way this space evolved from graphics programming - shader cores used to do fixed-function shading! But then people wanted them to be able to run arbitrary shaders and not just fixed-function. And then hey, look at this neat processor, let's run a compute program on it. At first that was "compute shaders" running across graphics APIs, then came CUDA, and later OpenCL. But it is still running on the part of the hardware that provides shading to the graphics pipeline.

Similarly, texture memory actually used to be used for textures, now it is a general-purpose binding that coalesces any type of memory access that has 1D/2D/3D locality.

You kinda just get used to it. Lots of niches have their own lingo that takes some learning. Mathematics is incomprehensible without it, really.